Underbelly (22 page)

Pentland said he understood that Bayeh and one of his employees – soon-to-be famous John Ibrahim – had paid for the food and drink. Billy also provided finance when Pentland went broke at the races trying to raise money to pay back a student loan.

‘I spent a lot of time at Canterbury race track,' Pentland admitted later. ‘If Bill ever had a good win out there and he was quite happy, he would slip me $200 and tell me to have a bet on him in the next race. I just lost the plot and took the money.'

Pentland left the police service after eight years on medical grounds but he didn't go quietly. His farewell party at the West End Hotel in the Sydney CBD was memorable.

His police mates, with Constable Gary Leach in the vanguard, inflicted serious injuries on a drinker at the hotel before throwing him into the street and kicking him unconscious. The man allegedly provoked the fracas by laughing at a policeman's moustache. Or possibly it was a police-woman's moustache. Steroid abuse was not unknown.

Unfortunately for the police involved, the entire episode
was caught on film by the Professional Integrity Branch who, co-incidentally, was investigating several officers at the party.

After police predictably denied any involvement in the fracas they were forced to watch tape of the incident showing the victim exploding out of the hotel doors and Leach and a Constable Peter Kelly kicking him as he lay on the footpath.

But such high jinks were trifles compared with the main game: Billy Bayeh was trying to hammer round blocks into square holes to explain his millions of dollars in unaccounted wealth. He was struggling with arithmetic.

The Commission showed him spending $278,300 from a salary of $35,000 in 1993-94. Outgoings included $120,000 towards buying a $500,000 luxury home, $18,000 to service a $400,000 mortgage, $50,000 in cash to a barrister who represented him in March 1994 in the District Court over cocaine charges, $32,000 to lease the Penthouse pool room at Kings Cross, $20,000 to Diners Club, $17,000 to establish a shoe shop at Bankstown, $16,000 cash to honeymoon in Lebanon and $6400 to a TAB phone account.

There were also spontaneous trips twice a month to Gold Coast luxury hotels and restaurants with his wife and friends and $10,000 gambling losses at Jupiter's Casino.

In desperation, Bayeh claimed the balance of the money had come from successful betting on racehorses. This brought guffaws from the crowd, as he had already been established as the world's worst punter. Counsel assisting, John Agius, said Billy owed more than $784,000 to book-maker Jeff Pendlebury.

In nine months Bayeh had turned over $3.6 million with Pendlebury – and lost most of it. Betting transaction sheets obtained by the inquiry showed he rarely had a winning day.

‘You must think you have won the lottery today if you think we will believe that (the success at punting)' said Agius.

Bayeh's betting exploits and Pendlebury's reaction to the non-payment of such a massive debt were the subject of much perusal. Agius suggested Pendlebury was involved in a money-laundering scheme with Bayeh. Or that Pendlebury, because of the debt, could lay claim to Bayeh's estate and hold it for him until any jail sentence was completed.

The bookmaker denied both suggestions, saying he had thought Bayeh was a coffee shop owner and became ‘frightened when told he was a big noise at the Cross.'

There is no doubt Bayeh was using one of the oldest dodges of all to launder black money. A criminal would wait at the races or at a TAB outlet until he saw a punter with a big winning ticket lining up to collect.

If the winning ticket was for $10,000, the criminal would offer the punter $11,000 for it and everyone was happy. The punter is $1000 better off and the criminal gets a TAB cheque for $10,000 of freshly laundered money.

The
Daily Telegraph's
Ray Chesterton found Pendlebury's patience in waiting for repayment of such a big debt extraordinarily heart-warming.

‘Remarkable? Well, astonishing really for those who never suspected the flinty hearts of bookies overflowed with such a passionate need to do deeds for needy punters,' he wrote.

‘There was no push for settlement, which should ensure Pendlebury is knocked off his stand at the next meeting by punters anxious to share the experience of such generosity.

‘Pendlebury thought Billy owned a coffee shop. Billy would have needed to be the sole outlet for Brazil's entire coffee crop to bet the way he did.'

Asked why he had a reputation as a drug dealer, Bayeh stumbled for an answer.

‘I just … people are jealous,' he muttered.

Three taped telephone calls added to intriguing evidence about Bayeh. He says in Arabic to one caller: ‘There is nothing good for cooking; it is only good for smoking or injections. If you bear with me for a few days I will get something for you.'

Bayeh conceded he was talking about cocaine but continued to deny he was a dealer. His stupidity and arrogance in believing he could live so lavishly without any visible legal means of support would be his undoing.

For all the amusement provided by squirming under questioning and offering bizarre explanations for his wealth, at times Bayeh showed himself as ruthless as any dealer on the streets.

He once told corrupt cop Trevor Haken he would kill anyone who got in his way or exposed his drug dealing. Then he would kill their families.

He used threats, renowned hard man Danny Karam and gun play to get rid of opposition dealers and would buy off police who posed interference.

To the end, though, Billy Bayeh remained mystifying. Despite having no defence against charges of bribing police and drug dealing earning him millions, Billy had trouble
grasping the seriousness of the situation. Even when he was caught on a secret camera cutting up drugs with KX11, he thought it might all go away.

Billy said all he wanted to do was sell his Cosmopolitan coffee shop at Kings Cross and leave Sydney to begin a new life with his pregnant wife when the Commission ended.

Counsel assisting the Commission John Agius confronted him, asking: ‘Has the reality of your situation dawned on you? When you woke up this morning and saw the sun did it also dawn on you that you would be in jail before this year is out.'

Puzzled, Bayeh replied: ‘I don't see why.'

Perhaps it finally dawned when he was arrested outside the Commission rooms and subsequently jailed for twelve years.

–
WITH RAY CHESTERTON

Hearing whispers on the street that he shouldn't be buying any green bananas, Louie started asking well-informed people's opinions about his life expectancy. The answers weren't reassuring.

 

LIKE his namesake Louie the Fly, Louie Bayeh was bad and mean and mighty unclean but at the end of the day, he was just a crook who got lucky … for a while. For a long time, he was worried there was trouble ahead and he was right.

The notorious criminal and standover man had more minders than Madonna for his rare public appearances because of death threats he claimed corrupt New South Wales police officers had made against him. He said the threats had been confirmed by a senior policeman – and by
the infamously psychotic and violent Lennie McPherson, Sydney's Mr Big.

Corrupt police wanted Louie dead because, like other allegedly tough guys on the streets – including his brother, the drug czar Billy Bayeh – he had cracked under pressure, telling an Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) hearing in the early 1990s the names of officers he paid and how much he paid them.

Hearing whispers on the street that he shouldn't be buying any green bananas, Louie started asking well-informed people's opinions about his life expectancy. The answers weren't reassuring. McPherson, his former partner in crime, sent a chill down his spine by telling him he was the target of a proposed assassination attempt by an alleged drug dealer who was facing charges.

McPherson said the deal bent police were offering was that in return for killing Bayeh they would drop the charges. It was a ‘win-win' for everyone in the game – except for the now rather rattled Louie. The planned hit was confirmed by senior policeman Merv Schloeffel, who was then working in internal security. The alleged dealer was again named as the likely assassin.

Bayeh contacted the would be assassin to get it from the horse's mouth. The man confirmed the deal. His reward for knocking Bayeh, he explained, would be to walk away from charges scot free. Bayeh didn't like the answer but couldn't fault the logic. He'd do exactly the same thing if the boot were on the other foot.

It was a stunning turnabout for Bayeh: to go from being predator to being the prey, a reversal of the role he had
made for himself since arriving in Australia from Lebanon in 1953, aged fourteen. He'd been in trouble ever since as he worked his way up the criminal career ladder.

An ICAC report from the mid-1990s said Bayeh had been convicted of five offences, mostly involving violence, but had never been sent to jail. Probably the closest he came to imprisonment was being found guilty of malicious wounding in 1980. He was ordered to pay fines and compensation of $3000 and put on a good behaviour bond for four years.

In 1990 he was ordered to perform 300 hours of community service for discharging a firearm near a public place. They were minor offences compared to the criminal heights he would reach as he created an empire built on selling violence and brutality to protect drug dealers, sleaze merchants, brothels, strip joints and pornography outlets.

Louie was also treacherous, manipulative and self-serving. Attempted murder and using guns, violence and bashing to maintain control were routine for him.

Trevor Haken, the self-confessed corrupt detective, never denied his hunger for graft from any source but made an exception for Bayeh. Haken says he never took slings from Bayeh because he despised him, saying he acted like a cartoon replica of a tough guy. Whenever possible, notably at a well-regarded Kings Cross restaurant called Pinocchio's, Haken went out of his way to make Louie's life miserable.

Bayeh would park his Mercedes with its blacked-out windows in the no-standing zone in front of the restaurant to emphasise his importance and contempt for the law. This was too tempting for Haken.

‘He acted like some Mafioso boss wanting everyone to see him so I'd wait until his food was served and then tell him to piss off out of there,' Haken says in his biography.

‘He didn't like it. It was a like a contest of importance. He was showing everyone how important he was so I'd show him he wasn't. I couldn't do business with him. He was so heavily involved with others I thought he was dangerous and that proved to be the case.'

During the 1980s Louie Bayeh discovered the real relationship between criminals and coppers at the Cross. He claimed he was framed by then detective Nelson Chad on a stealing charge and had asked what could be ‘done about it'. What would it cost to make it go away?

Chad asked for $200 a week and got it. Bayeh continued to pay Chad's replacement, John Brown – and paid more and more money to more and more police after that. When his business partner, Con Kontorinakis, complained that two police – Paul Brown and Ian Wally – had closed down the Love Machine drug outlet, Bayeh rang Chad.

A meeting was arranged in a restaurant and the two policemen said the place could re-open if weekly payments were made. ‘It all started from there,' Bayeh said.

The cosy arrangements came drastically unstuck when Bayeh was charged with drug offences in 1990. After years of watching the law enforced only against other people, Louie suddenly found himself arrested on drug charges that he naturally claimed were false. For once he might have been telling the truth.

Given the extensive police contacts he had bought and paid for, Bayeh was furious that he had been loaded up
without warning. He wanted answers. Every businessman wants a return on investment.

He claimed he'd paid a total of $12,000 to officers Ken McKnight (in two exchanges), $500 to Arnie Tees and another $500 to a third policeman to find out what was behind the frame-up. He never did find out – and retaliated by going to the ICAC in 1990 to complain about what had happened to him. After that, he claimed, he feared angry police would try to kill him in revenge.

At a meeting with Inspector Arnie Tees, Louie wore a wire to get evidence and told the ICAC that corrupt officers had offered him the names of the police responsible for the set-up – and the reason for it. This information would cost him $10,000.

He told the Commission the police who made the offer could be set up for a raid by anti-corruption forces at a lunch he would organise. Under surveillance, Bayeh was seen lunching with half a dozen men known to be police. He was also seen leaving the restaurant to withdraw $12,000 from a nearby bank and then returning to the restaurant. Then it all got murky, in typical Bayeh double-dealing style.

He claimed he passed the $10,000 to a policeman or police in the restaurant toilet. The surveillance crew outside said they saw nothing. An account of the stake-out was passed to the Department of Public Prosecutions, who ruled there was not enough evidence for criminal proceedings.

And the original charges against Bayeh that started the interest in corrupt police allegations? They were part heard
at the time of Bayeh's $10,000 bribe revelation. And they were subsequently dismissed.

The ICAC, which had to explain its performance to a Parliamentary Joint Committee, refused to have any further dealings with Bayeh after he demanded, in addition to the usual protection arrangements, payment of three million dollars if he gave further evidence.

That was part of the intriguing backdrop to Bayeh's appearance before the Royal Commission in 1995. Although Bayeh claimed he no longer paid protection money, he said he still feared for his life because of his revelations about police corruption to the ICAC.

He also had grave concerns about the attitude and unpredictability of Lennie McPherson, whose reputation as a standover man, thief, armed gangster and robber, drug dealer and killer – and ‘fixer' – was unmatched in the Australian underworld.